POTSDAM, Germany (RNS) This city, about 22 miles southwest of Berlin, is gaining new prominence, as a center of Jewish learning. Last month the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam opened to great fanfare. It joins two rabbinical seminaries.

ROME (RNS) Statements by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi were the latest in a string of recent incidents that brought the Holocaust and Nazi Germany out of the history books and onto the front pages of Italian media.

(RNS) Supporters of the pageants say the event, which featured live performances and even a comedian, is an affirmation of life and a boost to the contestants’ self-esteem. Detractors call the concept “distasteful,” saying it capitalizes on the victims’ vulnerability.

(RNS) Imagine that Joe Lieberman had been elected president. And that in a moment of crisis, he felt compelled to explain that some American Jewish support for Israel is partly explained by the Jewish cultural memory of the Holocaust. Would he be accused of whatever the Jewish equivalent of “race-baiting” might be?

(RNS) The apology came three days after the Simon Wiesenthal Center published on its website a photograph of a female student in a university graduation gown posing in front of the larger-than-life banner with her arm outstretched in a Sieg Heil salute.

WASHINGTON (RNS) Adult survivors of the Holocaust are largely gone, and those who survived as children won’t be around much longer. That’s why when the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum marks its 20th anniversary Monday, museum officials say it’s likely to be one the last large gatherings of survivors.

(RNS) Against great odds, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus set out from Philadelphia to rescue 50 children from Nazi-controlled Austria, the subject of a new HBO documentary set to air on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

(RNS) Many American Jews and others are fervently rebutting a claim made by gun rights activists: that gun control kept firearms from European Jewry, and made the Holocaust, if not possible, than more catastrophic than it would otherwise have been.